Monterey

I was pretty sure that I’d seen God onstage.

—Bob Weir

Late on the evening of June 18, 1967, as Saturday night turned to Sunday morning, the San Francisco–based rock group known as the Jefferson Airplane concluded their forty-minute set to rousing applause from the 7,500 fans who filled the fairgrounds arena in the resort town of Monterey, California, on the second night of an event billed as the First International Pop Festival. The Airplane were local heroes to the crowd at Monterey, many of whom lived in the Bay Area and had followed the band’s career from its inception in 1965. Along with other whimsically named groups like the Charlatans, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Grateful Dead, they had gotten their start in the folk coffeehouses and rock ballrooms of the Haight-Ashbury, a neighborhood on the eastern edge of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park whose recent emergence as a bohemian enclave had captured the imagination of young people across America. During the first half of 1967, a series of sensationalistic articles had appeared in newspapers and national magazines describing this self-styled “psychedelic city-state” and the long-haired, hedonistic “hippies” who populated it. This rash of publicity had inspired tens of thousands of footloose college students, college dropouts, teenaged runaways, and “flower children” of all ages to converge on San Francisco in anticipation of an idyllic “Summer of Love.”

The Monterey Pop Festival was timed to coincide with the start of that summer. The idea for the festival had originated a few months before as a gleam in the eye of a neophyte Los Angeles promoter named Alan Pariser, who envisioned it as a pop-oriented version of the seaside jazz and folk festivals at Newport and Monterey that had served as a fashionable form of summertime entertainment since the 1950s. After booking the fairgrounds and enlisting a well-connected Hollywood Brit named Derek Taylor (who had previously worked for the Beatles) as their publicist, Pariser and his partner, a talent agent named Ben Shapiro, approached the Los Angeles folk-rock group The Mamas and the Papas with the intent of hiring them as headliners. The group’s leader, John Phillips, and their producer, Lou Adler, responded with a vision of their own. They proposed expanding the size and scope of the festival and using it to showcase the explosion of creative energy that had enveloped the world of popular music in the three years since the arrival of the Beatles in America in 1964. They also proposed staging the festival on a nonprofit basis, with the performers donating their services and the proceeds going to charity.

When Shapiro balked at this idea, Phillips and Adler bought out his interest and formed a new partnership with Pariser. They then set out to assemble a roster of some thirty acts, enough to fill three nights and two days of music. Toward this end, they established a tony-sounding “board of governors” that included such prominent pop stars as Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Smokey Robinson, and Brian Wilson. Though none of these luminaries actually attended or performed, they gave the festival enough cachet to ensure that most of the artists the promoters contacted accepted their invitation to appear. In the deft hands of Derek Taylor, the advance publicity for the festival also attracted some twelve hundred loosely credentialed representatives of the press, as well as enough agents, managers, and record company executives to lend the proceedings the feeling of an open-air music business trade fair.

Phillips and Adler recognized that staging the festival on a nonprofit basis was essential to realizing their more parochial goal, which was to celebrate California’s sudden ascendancy in the world of popular music, with Los Angeles now recognized as the pop recording center of America and San Francisco as the home of the country’s most dynamic underground music scene. (Fully half the acts that performed came from the West Coast, with the balance drawn from points east, including the new pop capital of London.) Yet bridging the gap between the Northern and Southern Californian nodes of musical sensibility was no simple matter, for the two factions approached one another with the suspicion of rival tribes, vying over their respective notions of the California Dream. The music business in Los Angeles was just that—a branch of the entertainment industry governed by conventional Hollywood standards of stardom and success. The music scene in San Francisco, by contrast, subscribed to a bohemian ethos whose insularity and self-regard had been supercharged by the grandiosity of the psychedelic drug culture. Bay Area bands that could barely sing or play in tune professed to distain the “commercialism” and “slick professionalism” of their counterparts in L.A. At this point, the music of the Haight-Ashbury was a hodgepodge of strident folk harmonies, impressionistic lyrics, modal improvisation, and sophomoric electric blues. But the purported affinities of this music with the effects of hallucinogenic drugs had earned it the label acid rock and generated a formidable mystique.

By the time of their appearance at Monterey, the Jefferson Airplane had established themselves as the most musically accomplished and commercially successful exponents of the San Francisco Sound. Their second album, Surrealistic Pillow, stood high on the Billboard charts, while their latest single, an anthem of alienation called “Somebody to Love,” had attained a saturation-level presence on the airwaves of America’s Top 40 radio stations. Onstage and off, the group dressed with a theatrical flair that erased the lines between clothing and costume. All five of the men wore Beatlesque helmets of shoulder-length hair; the one woman, a former fashion model named Grace Slick, had the pale skin, luminous eyes, and flowing kaftan robes of a pagan priestess. Yet, unlike the Beatles and their fellow “British Invasion” bands, who had institutionalized the “rock group” as an autonomous musical unit, the members of the Jefferson Airplane did not project an almost familial uniformity of appearance. They looked instead like a patchwork of different types—a Western gunslinger, a Regency dandy, a bespectacled Sioux—drawn from the collective unconscious of a generation of television babies, raised on a diet of half-hour period dramas. In this the members of the band were indistinguishable from the members of their audience. “At times, our audience was more outrageous than the people onstage,” recalled Paul Kantner, the group’s rhythm guitarist.

Though the Jefferson Airplane were hometown heroes to the crowd at Monterey, they were not the headlining act on the second night of the festival. No sooner had they finished their set than the harried stage crew, pressed by a midnight curfew that had already expired, began replacing their banks of amplifiers with the more modest gear of a four-piece rhythm section called Booker T. and the MGs and a two-piece horn section called the Mar-Keys. Their presence at Monterey owed to their role as the studio band for Stax Records, a small Memphis label that specialized in a distinctive brand of earthy, gospel-tinged rhythm and blues whose roots in the fervent emotionalism of the black church had earned it the label “soul music.” The most prominent and charismatic artist associated with Stax was the singer Otis Redding, and it was as the prelude and accompaniment to Redding’s eagerly anticipated performance that the MGs and the Mar-Keys now prepared to take the stage.

Whereas the members of the Jefferson Airplane blended easily into the crowd of predominantly white, long-haired, flamboyantly dressed young people who filled the fairgrounds arena, the MGs and Mar-Keys—three of them white, three of them black—could well have arrived there, as one of them later said, “from another planet.” To a man, their hair was cut short and, in the case of the white musicians, swept back into the sort of sculpted pompadour that was commonly associated in 1967 with television evangelists and country music stars. Even more anomalous was the fact that the six of them were dressed in matching, double-breasted, lime-green and electric-blue stage suits from Lansky Brothers, a local institution in Memphis whose most famous client, Elvis Presley, could be said to stand for everything in the realm of contemporary American popular music that the West Coast bands were not.

From his seat in the VIP section, just behind the photographers’ pit that ran in front of the stage, Jerry Wexler awaited the start of Otis Redding’s set with mounting trepidation. A vice-president of Atlantic Records, Wexler was a renowned music executive and producer, best known for his work with Ray Charles and, more recently, Aretha Franklin. He was also a notorious worrier, and he felt a sense of personal responsibility for Redding’s presence at Monterey. It was Wexler who had nurtured the relationship between Atlantic and Stax that put the fledgling Memphis label on the map, and who had assured Redding’s manager, Phil Walden, that the festival would be a prime opportunity for his client to connect with the burgeoning audience for progressive rock.

Yet Wexler himself was unnerved by the countercultural pageant he encountered at Monterey. It was not the thick haze of marijuana smoke hovering over the fairgrounds that gave him pause; Wexler had been smoking “reefer” since his club-hopping days in Harlem in the 1930s. It was rather that much of the music he had heard during the afternoon and evening concerts on Saturday had impressed him as amateurish, bombastic, and banal, and he was now consumed with doubt about how this crowd of wide-eyed dilettantes would respond to the raw emotional intensity and high-energy stagecraft of Otis Redding’s performance. To make matters worse, a cold drizzle...